Led Zeppelin Talks Sex, Hobbits and Elvis on ‘Letterman’

The forests may or may not echo with laughter these days, but the Ed Sullivan Theater certainly did on Monday, thanks to an appearance by Led Zeppelin on "Late Show With David Letterman."

After being lauded with Kennedy Center honors with Letterman over the weekend, the surviving members of the band — Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones — dropped in on the show for a chat with the late-night host on Monday's episode of "Late Show." While, lamentably, the group did not serve as the show's musical guests, they did hold forth on a number of topics, including Hobbits, sex and Elvis Presley.

Letterman mentioned that funnyman Jack Black claimed that Led Zeppelin's music "was about sex, it was about Vikings, it was about Vikings having sex" during his introduction of the band at the Kennedy Center event. To which bassist Jones quipped, "You missed the bit about the Vikings having sex with the Hobbits."

Letterman later asked the group to offer a pithy description of the Led Zeppelin sound.

"Help me out with the music," Letterman queried. "How would I describe it? How would I say it in a sentence?"

Jones responded by humming the riff to "The Immigrant Song" while playing a mean air guitar.

The group was reluctant to discuss its interactions with other bands of its era. However, singer Plant did reveal that they'd had an encounter with the King, Elvis Presley.

"We met him, the four of us in about 1973," Plant noted. "He had a lot of chicks."